With Ivy League teams ten games into their “14-game tournament” to determine who will represent the league in the NCAA tournament, it’s clear that the race for the automatic bid is down to two teams: Harvard and Yale. The Crimson have won the Ivy League’s automatic bid each of the last two seasons and entered the 2013-14 campaign the prohibitive favorite to win the league.

But they lost the first meeting this season between the two teams, falling 74-67 in Cambridge on February 8. That win was big for a Yale team that already had a loss in league play, with the Bulldogs moving into a tie atop the Ivy League standings as a result. Unfortunately for Yale the tie was broken on Sunday afternoon by the Columbia Lions, who beat the Bulldogs 62-46 in New York City.

James Jones’ Bulldogs struggled mightily with its shooting in all areas on Sunday afternoon, shooting 36.4% from the field and 5-for-16 from beyond the arc. But while those two areas can be credited in part to the defensive effort of Kyle Smith’s Columbia squad, the fact that Yale made just nine of its 22 free throw attempts cannot. And the foul line proved to be one of the biggest keys in Sunday’s matchup, with Columbia making 17 of its 22 attempts from the charity stripe.

Alex Rosenberg scored 18 points and Steve Frankoski added 17 off the bench for Columbia, which also received 16 points from Maodo Lo. And while Rosenberg and Lo have led the way offensively for the Lions the came can’t be said of Frankoski, who’s averaging 3.9 points per game and has dealt with injuries for much of this season. There were no such issues for Frankoski against Yale, as he bounced back from a scoreless Friday night (six minutes of action) against Brown.

Sunday’s result is a big one when looking at the schedules ahead of both Yale and Harvard. The Bulldogs still have two games left to play on their current four-game road trip, with games at Princeton and Penn next weekend. As for Harvard, they host Cornell and Columbia before finishing their regular season with road games at Yale and Brown. To look ahead to the second meeting between Harvard and Yale on March 7 may be tempting, but both teams have business to attend to before reaching that date.